Midlife - And DARE you call it a crisis!

Last weekend we had an invite to the 20th anniversary celebration of a couple who’re good friends. The invite said ‘6.30PM’, and by nature, I was pacing back & forth in our living room from 4 PM onwards, ushering my exasperated wife and daughter, lest we get late. And when we showed up at the venue, no surprises this, we were the first among the guests to arrive ??! But the actual surprise was that our host remarked in a good-natured way that they expected me to show up first. I found my own predictability as hilarious and made a mental note – ‘AB – You’re officially middle-aged now! ??, someone who talks slow, walks slow & tells the same joke twice a week, assuming he’s still funny, and someone who shows up four hours before a domestic flight!).

?So today, let us talk about ‘late bloomers’ like us – folks who missed building a unicorn while still in their teens, and who, despite 2.5 decades of zig-zagging through the labyrinths of the corporate jungle, didn’t quite arrive anywhere great, but ( & this is a BUT) who refused to settle down & give in to the unfairness of the Ovarian lottery they were dealt with. Middle aged people, but who refuse to succumb to a mid-life crisis. ?Is that interesting ?

?Some years back , while in my early 40s, I had written a post about Mid-life, and insisted on why it should not be termed a crisis. The post had led to some unforeseen excitement in my social network community that comprised of a few dozen middle aged men and women like myself who had just started realizing that they were stuck in those decades of life where they were too old to be either cool , or hot . And too young to be dead . These folks were suddenly relieved to read that whatever was happening to them by way of chaotic hormones, leading to triple chins , diminishing metabolic rates, receding hairlines, exploding waist lines, and fast vanishing other aspects ( err, let’s leave it as ‘aspects’ for now) , was not some kind of a unique dreaded disease they alone had contracted, but something that was happening to everyone else around, making them all do stupid things.

?Over the years, I have been receiving polite reminders from several loyal & alert readers to do a sequel to the post. So, here goes!

?‘Mid-Life Crisis’ is a phenomenon that wasn’t discovered, but perhaps invented.

?In 1957, a 40-year-old Canadian Psychoanalyst named Elliot Jacques stood before the British Psycho-Analytical Society & presented a paper that was more anecdotal & laced with Freudian phrases rather than being fact-backed, and where, among other things, he coined the term ‘mid-life crisis’, which ‘comes around’ in the late 30s when people confront the inevitability of their own mortality & which then leads to ‘a period of psychological disturbance & depressive breakdown’.

?The term raced to become what was the ‘viral’ equivalent of the 50s, capturing collective public imagination & setting the table for a popular narrative for decades to follow, again unfortunately standing on a flimsy foundation of stereotypical anecdotes rather than science. The middle-aged mother of three suddenly colors her hair pink & buys a red car for herself. The 45-year-old man gets a mermaid tattoo on his arm, grows a ponytail & a grey beard and heads for the hills on his Harley. The accomplished CEO of an organization falls from grace by running away with a 19-year-old. So on.

?So, is mid-point really the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?

?First things first. Yes, there is indeed a sag in subjective wellbeing in our middle years. This is partly because of unrealized expectations. It is like crossing over to the second half of a wonderful book or entering a dark cinema after the intermission – where you suspect that the good parts are already over and hereafter it is just a reluctant trot till you reach the back cover or till the credits roll up. Your 2 AM insomnia reminds you that your yesterdays now outnumber your tomorrows and so many of your innocent dreams will never see the light of the day in this lifetime. At twenty, the whole world stretches out like an enormous ocean in front of you and you have infinite combinations of choices to hoist your sails and set off for new lands and new adventures. The universe bows to your youth and to its whims. Life is a never-ending realm of possibilities in front of you. Finally, at 4 AM when you fall back into sleep, you do so ?by letting go of these. One after the other, you start shedding your dreams and making peace with each departure as you head into the next leg of the journey, each day a little narrower than the one before. With each passing day you start saying goodbyes – to people and to places, getting a little lonelier with each passing year. And the worst part is that you often fail to realize this transition till you are midway through because all this happens when you are too caught up in your theatre, donning masks and playing roles.

25 years back, you were a challenger to the Gods. Now, you’re unsure. About yourself. Sometimes, about God as well.

?It’s nothing to do with your ethnicity or gender. There is mostly a slump in the middle. For all.

?The good news is, it’s just a slump. Whether it is a game, a project, or our own life, we all tend to relax our standards & slow down in the middle. We get fond of our beginnings & our Page One (which explains all those reunion meets we sign up for) & we all understand the significance of the End that awaits us (and start attending funerals) – But to some extent we all build in a denial of the present. The middles, as Daniel Pink brilliantly says, are muddy & get lost – well, in the middle.

?The good news is that subjective wellbeing again picks up later in life. The second good news is that while mid-points sometimes slow us down, they also speed us up on other occasions. Ask any project team that realizes it’s halfway past its schedule. Or a sports team at half-time when it realizes it is mid-point between victory & defeat.

?On a personal note, the last five years years of my life have been very different from the twenty years preceding them. Realizing that this is no dress rehearsal but my own life whizzing by, I paused and reached out, dusting all my hats I had left behind, while trying to run races I was not meant for. In these five years, I have given myself the freedom to be the ‘me’ I was meant to be. Maybe not as dramatic as Ved’s transformation in ‘Tamashaa’, but in my own subtle way. Curiously, five years on, most people who know me today, no longer remember what I do for a day job, an identity I had so fiercely protected for 20 years ??! Will I win a Booker or get a call from Stockholm in this lifetime? No, I won’t. But I will now walk into the sunset knowing that I gave myself a shot at a life I wanted. And who knows - I may even refuse to accept that it's a sunset, the cranky Bong that I am !

?Here are a few thoughts from a late bloomer for fellow late bloomers caught up in their existential flux. Try them. They’ll set you free. To be you.

?

• Don’t walk around looking for reasons to be offended. There are more good than bad things in this world. Look for them.
• Loosen up. Look at the funny side in everything. Laugh at yourself often. You’ll be dead for a long time after this ??!
• This coming Sunday, sit yourself down like a friend and make peace with your recalibrated life. Just let go of your life story & allow it to drift into a corner of the blue sky, like a string of balloons released from captivity
• Let go of your strong opinions & your pet peeves ( peeves anyway make for lousy pets, as someone said).
• Be okay not being okay.
• Failing and failure are different. Fail often. Just don’t fail at the same things twice.
• Unasked forgiveness & unexpressed love are the heaviest burdens to carry. Say those sorrys. Make people you love, feel special. They won’t be around forever.
• You’ll never arrive. Stop looking for a final destination. The best journeys are about U-turns and missed turns.
• When no one seems to be picking you up, take charge & pick someone else up.
• For attention, speak first. For impact, speak last.
• If you cannot sit & hold a meaningful conversation with a 12-year old, you’ve started to die.
• Your drive doesn’t go away as you go older. It just needs to rearrange itself. Never stop looking for new challenges to feed your drive.
• Everyone you see out there, is carrying a private inside story within them. A small, lovely poem that started nicely but didn’t quite end. A melodious song whose notes gave up midway because no one was listening. Today, try being an engaged audience for someone else.
• Getting older is a ritual of unbelonging, an ode to your deepest beliefs, a secret sorcery of dreams that live on. Like embers in leftover ashes. Even after the final word of the last prayer has been uttered. And denied. And the final rumor about the non-existence of Gods, spoken.
• Never stop telling your story. You’re the solo hero and author of your autobiography. Write on a post-it and stick it on your bathroom mirror – ‘This is someone who didn’t give up!’

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(Did the post connect with you? Do leave your comments. If you like reading standalone articles on overlapping boundaries or work & life, you may check out my books available on Amazon in your country)

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